Dr. Wily #1 [Review]
Udon's Dr. Wily #1 lets Mega Man's arch-nemesis tell his own version of events.
Dr. Wily #1 hit shops on August 5, about seven weeks past the June 17 date Udon originally solicited it for, which gave them plenty of time to fill the gap with some exciting announcements. At its San Diego Comic-Con panel in July, Udon revealed a Mega Man X prequel one-shot called Dawn of Sigma, a six-issue Mega Man X2 adaptation, a Legends miniseries from David Oxford and Mic Fong, and (my personal favorite) the revival of Archie's Mega Man as Mega Man Adventures #0, which doubles as chapter 56 and picks up the Mega Man 4 adaptation Ian Flynn left unfinished when that run stopped at issue 55 in 2015.
Capcom set the table back in December, putting Mega Man: Dual Override on stage at The Game Awards with a 2027 window across Switch, Switch 2, PS4, PS5, Xbox systems, and PC. That timing lines up with the fortieth anniversary of the NES original, and Capcom has since talked about growing Mega Man back into a core IP, the tier where Resident Evil and Monster Hunter live.
Now, I’m a huge Mega Man fan, but if you’re feeling a bit skeptical, that’s a fair reaction.
Mega Man 11 shipped in 2018 with similar noises attached and the series then went quiet for most of a decade, which is why Rockman Corner met the Dual Override reveal by pointing out that Capcom has now pulled the once-a-decade trick twice. What separates this round is a schedule you can count: five Timelines one-shots from May through September 2025, a five-issue Mega Man X adaptation by Daniel Arseneault and Hanzo Steinbach that wrapped on July 29, and Gear Masters #1 due September 23.
In Dr. Wily, Maiden builds the issue around an unreliable narrator, the right instinct for a man who has lost to the same robot eleven times without ever revising his theory of why. Wily recounts his own history, and in his version Dr. Light is the antagonist, a credit thief who took Albert's ideas and buried a better scientist under his own name. He wants belief and demands it in the same breath. Maiden keeps him arrogant and theatrical without turning him cruel, which holds the book in the Saturday-morning tone the classic series has always worked in. Bass spends most of his page time openly disrespecting the man who assembled him, and that friction characterizes Wily faster than any monologue could. None of it moves him off Mega Man or off the older grievance underneath, which is proving to Light that the wrong man got the lab and the credit for building Rock.
Ryan Jampole on interiors is the draw for longtime readers. He worked on Archie's Mega Man across its 2011 to 2015 run and has spent the years since on Sonic books, so the visual grammar here is muscle memory. Faces stay legible at small sizes, which matters in a comic where most of the comedy lives in Wily's eyebrows and facial expressions. Panel-to-panel movement is clean, wide establishing shots giving way to tight reaction beats without the layout gymnastics that can lose younger readers halfway down a page.
A seven-year-old can read this one alone with no parent hovering to explain anything, and I believe that it’s a space that is currently painfully underserved. At the risk of painting with too broad a brush, publishers seem to keep chasing after collectors and disregarding the on-ramp…a trend I hope that ongoing success of a Mega Man franchise could help disrupt. The Archie Mega Man run is one of the few complete series I never resold during the pandemic stretch when my buddy Lance and I were buying and flipping collections, and it holds that spot because it’s a faithful and fun rendition of one of my favorite video game franchises of all time. To see the series getting so much attention in the year of our Lord 2026 brings a smile to my face with each new solicitation.
The open question is whether Udon can hold their schedule. Dr. Wily #1 missed by seven weeks, and Udon has said Mega Man Adventures only becomes an ongoing if enough readers turn out for issue #0.
A prelude is worth whatever follows it, and this is explicitly a prelude to Gear Masters, a five-issue arc built around Dr. Light's prototype Double Gear system with Wily coming to take it back.
I know I’ll be putting my money where my mouth is and adding this to my pull, and if you’re interested in seeing this renaissance of Mega Man comics continue, I encourage you to do the same! For now, pick up Dr. Wily and enjoy!
Dr. Wily #1
Dr. Wily #1 is a sharp all-ages one-shot that doubles as the runway for Gear Masters in September.
